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This article focuses on different ways in which socially disadvantaged parents engage with their children's educational experiences, and provides evidence of the role they play in opening or narrowing their children's access to education. Disadvantaged parents are usually associated with weak or difficult educational trajectories for their children, because of their lower level of economic, cultural, and social capital. Nevertheless, this association does not operate as an automatic mechanism. Indeed, against a backdrop of persisting inequalities, research data show a plurality of intraclass and intragroup dynamics, with disadvantaged parents having diverse ways of avoiding blaming processes, saving dignity, and acting as proactive agents for their children's educational career.

Drawing from the findings of the European project 'Partispace', this chapter analyses three solidarity initiatives promoted by youth leftist groups in Bologna (Italy). Materials were collected through an ethnographic study that included in-depth interviews with young activists. This material highlights the connections between the initiatives of these groups, their objectives and practices, in the context of the global financial crisis as experienced in Italy. The analysis shows that these initiatives, while seeking to mitigate the problems faced by vulnerable groups (i.e. migrants, refugees, and the homeless), were also fuelled by practices of self-help aimed at responding to the unheeded 'generational needs' of the young people themselves. The projects emerge as 'laboratories of political resistance' where strategies for collective action based on mutual help and self-empowerment are experimented with and enacted.

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